Preparing to Replace the Disk Drive

Identify the faulty disk drive.

Different applications provide various levels of error logging. In general, you can find messages about failing or failed disks in your system console window. The information is also logged in the /usr/adm/messages file(s). See the documentation that came with your application for more information.

Back up your system.

Refer to the documentation that came with your system for backup details.

Identify the disk media name for the disk you intend to replace.

# vxdisk list | grep cwtxdysz

For example, if the disk to be removed is c2t1d0, enter:

# vxdisk list | grep c0t1d0
c2t1d0s2 sliced disk01 rootdg online

The disk media name is the third field in the output above: disk01.

You can use the vxdiskadm utility to prepare the disk for replacement.

Type vxdiskadm in a shell.

# vxdiskadm

This operation is interactive and requires user confirmation of the operation.

Select the "Remove a disk for replacement"option.

When prompted for a disk name to replace, type the disk media name from Step 4.

vxdiskadm marks the disk for replacement and saves the subdisk information to be rebuilt on the replacement disk.

Redundant data is automatically recovered after the replacement disk has been reattached to Volume Manager. Nonredundant data is identified as unusable and must be re-created from backups.